“Where the meeting lasted all of about five minutes,” Hope said. “Which means there’s an hour unaccounted for.”
“Did you ask Marcus where he was?”
“Uh-huh. He was evasive. Finally he said he went for a walk. He said he had a lot on his mind and just wanted to figure some things out. When I asked him what things he said they had had nothing to do with the case.” She looked past me, at the water, and for the first time I saw a flicker of fear in her eyes. “Keeping secrets is the worst thing he could be doing right now.”
The words hung in the air between us. “I’ll find out where he was,” I said, working to keep the emotions that were swirling in my chest from getting out. “I’ll find out all of it.”
Hope looked away again for a moment. “I don’t want this to come between the two of you.”
I believed her. She loved him and I should have seen that a long time ago but I could also see that she wanted him to be happy.
“It isn’t going to come between us.”
“I have to go,” Hope said abruptly.
“Wait,” I said. “Did you find anything more about Dani’s family?”
“I’ve got a line on someone who might be able to give us some inside information.”
I nodded. “Good. I’m going to out to see Marcus and I’ll stop and talk to Oren about the guy in the truck.”
“Okay, I’ll talk to you later, then,” Hope said. She walked back across the grass to her car. I was about to head back to the truck when my phone rang. It was Marcus. He had been planning to make dinner for us. I had thought I might stop to talk to Oren on the way out to Marcus’s house. If I left now I could still do that.
“How do you feel about spaghetti at Eric’s?” he asked.
“Okay, but what happened to spaghetti at your house?”
“My stove won’t work. Larry Taylor is coming to take a look at it in the morning. I told him it wasn’t an emergency.”
I started for the truck. “Okay,” I said. “I’ll meet you at the café in about an hour. There’s something I need to do first.”
Oren’s house was a renovated farmhouse not a lot different from mine, with the same steeply pitched roof and bay window. His house had an addition on the left side, set back from the main house. A covered veranda ran along about half of the front of the main house and all the way across the front of the extension.
I could see his truck in the driveway as I got close to the house. He was on the veranda painting what looked like a long wooden bench with a hinged seat.
I pulled my truck in behind his and got out. Oren waved his paintbrush in greeting and got to his feet. He was tall and lean, in his mid-fifties, with sun-bleached sandy hair. He minded me of actor Clint Eastwood with a little quiet farm boy thrown in.
“Hello, Kathleen,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”
“It’s good to see you, too, Oren,” I said with a smile. I craned my neck to get a closer look at the bench. “Is that going in Roma’s porch?”
He nodded. “It gives people somewhere to sit down and take off their boots in the winter time and it gives Roma some storage space.”
The bench was about five feet long and he was painting it a pale gray that reminded me of foggy mornings down by the water. “You’ve done a beautiful job,” I said.
Oren was a very talented carpenter. He was an even better musician. He could have been a famous concert pianist but it wasn’t the life he’d wanted for himself. He could play the piano by the time he was four and he’d started composing music at six, using his own method of notation because he hadn’t learned to read music at that point.
As he had once explained to me, “I could—I can—make music with almost any instrument: piano, guitar, bass, mandolin. If I look at a piece of music, just once, I can remember it and play it. Years later I can play it.”
As someone whose musical ability was limited to making sounds with my armpit and not very well at that, I was in awe of his talent.
“Roma showed me the bench you and Maggie found for the upstairs hallway,” he said, reaching down to set his brush on the edge of the painting pail. “You did a beautiful job on that.”
“Thank you,” I said. “All that took was paint and sandpaper. You built this.”
He smiled again and ducked his head. “My father was a good teacher.”
I cleared my throat. “Oren, I need to talk to you about something.”
He didn’t ask me what, he just nodded. “All right. I just need to put the paint back in the can and wash the brush.”
He put one more stroke of paint on the front of the bench seat, then bent down and picked up the plastic pail.
“It’ll only take me a minute,” he said. “C’mon in.”
The extension attached to the main house was Oren’s workshop. The space was completely open from floor to ceiling. There were high windows on the back wall that flooded the room with light even on the darkest winter days. More windows on the end of the room overlooked the long workbench. There was a counter with cupboards underneath and a sink at one end over on the other side of the room. Everything in the room was neat, clean and perfectly organized.
I stood in the doorway and remembered the first time I’d seen the space. My mouth had literally gaped open. Oren’s father, Karl Kenyon, had worked as a carpenter and a house painter. But he had the soul of an artist. In his spare time he made massive metal sculptures. The first one I’d ever seen was an enormous metal eagle with a wingspan of at least six feet. It had been suspended, in flight it seemed, from the ceiling beams at the back half of the room. Even though the sculpture was nothing more than pieces of metal welded together somehow I’d felt I could see the bird flying, its powerful chest muscles making those huge wings slice through the air. Now the beautiful bird, along with another of Karl Kenyon’s pieces, was touring museums on the East Coast.
Oren looked over his shoulder at me. “It still looks a little empty when I come out here,” he said.
“Those pieces deserve to be seen,” I said.
“It’s happening because of you.” He shook the wet brush in the sink before setting it in an empty ice cream container on the counter.
“Actually it’s happening because of you,” I said. “I’m glad you said yes to letting them be exhibited.”
Oren poured the paint back into the can, hammered the lid back on and set the pail in the sink. He walked back over to me, wiping his hands on his overalls.
I looked around the room. Something else was missing besides the metal eagle.
“What happened to the harpsichord?” I asked.
Oren looked down at his feet for a moment. “I sold it,” he said. “I’m going to build a guitar. Burtis is clearing part of his woodlot. He promised me first choice of the wood.”
I smiled. “I’m looking forward to seeing and hearing it.”
“Would you like a cup of coffee, Kathleen?” he asked.
It felt awkward being here to ask Oren if he had a cousin living in the woods who just might have killed a woman. It would be good to have something to keep my hands occupied. I nodded. “Yes, I would.”
Oren indicated the two stools at the counter, then poured a cup for each of us. There was a carton of milk and a little bowl of sugar cubes on a tray by the coffeemaker. After we’d both doctored our coffee, he folded one hand around his mug and looked at me. “I heard about Detective Gordon’s friend,” he said. “I’m sorry. Does what you want to talk to me about have anything to do with that?”
“In a way,” I said.
He nodded, took a drink from his mug and set it on the counter again. “Ira. He’s been living in his truck out by the lake. That’s who you want to talk to me about.”
“Yes.”
For a long moment Oren didn’t speak, didn’t move. Then finally he said, “You think he might have been the one who hurt that woman.”